Suffragette was a film that made me think about how easy it is to take for granted what we have when others have fought for it in the past. A friend of mine suggested that all people turning 18 should watch this film so that they understand the sacrifice that others have made to gain the vote. Not a bad idea, if perhaps difficult to execute without it becoming ironically patronising.
‘The vote’ is so much more than a vote for a particular
government, although this is clearly its fundamental meaning. Having a say in
the government and therefore the type of society we choose to live in is
clearly a critical human right. When I say ‘much more than’, I mean
that the vote represents having a place in society, a franchise to exercise a
form of choice, rather than being controlled and impotent. For the women
(and men) of the suffragette movement, this need for enfranchisement was a
fight for the fundamental right to be treated equally, with dignity, rather
than as a chattel, a possession or a pawn of others (men). The civil
rights movement was a similar struggle for enfranchisement in
America, and the anti-apartheid movement was a local and worldwide push for
equal standing for all people in South Africa, instead of the oppression of the
majority by the powerful (white) minority.
In all of these struggles we see individuals making
incredible sacrifices, such as the mother losing her son and her marriage in
Suffragette, and the aggregate impact of these individuals creating a force
for change in society at large. And yet a few years later we are at risk
of taking these changes for granted. To do so we dishonour those
individuals who felt so strongly about the injustice that they were willing to
sacrifice everything in order to create change for those that would come
later. We owe it to them to never forget.